Wednesday, December 30, 2015

SABBATH involves the practice of shalom; that distinguished
peace that pervades our being. My best Sabbath
is practiced at the beach, alone, with a refreshment and a book with blank
pages and a pen. Just as close is a being
still in lush vegetation, especially where there’s a view, for where there’s a
view there’s perspective.

Sabbath is about perspective — the reclamation; the
resurrection; the redemption.

Sabbath is the reclamation of our soul’s centred peace. It’s the resurrection of our tired and worn
out bodies and minds. It’s redemption
when we thought redemption would never come.

Sabbath is about less in a world that convinces us to want
more. It’s about the art of peace
through the craft of release.

The more we have, the more need we have of control. The more
control we need, the less peace we have. Peace comes readily when we regularly
let go.

These are the theses for a life that promises so much that
when we do much we experience less peace.
There is a classic reverse correlation.
More is less. More content in our
lives means less actual spiritual content; less peace.

The art of peace is the craft of release.

The difficult thing in our world is getting away from it
every now and then.

And if we hold to the idea that out of peace comes
thankfulness, enough to be grateful, which infuses joy, and propels us forward
in hope, then we’re impelled to take our opportunities to refresh, renew, and
revitalise.

***

So, the art of peace is the craft of release.

The more we’re able to let go, the more peace we’re able to
receive, as a product of losing our lives to save them — the gospel principle
that our Lord Jesus taught us.

And that’s the only difficult part in making an art of peace by
the craft of release — we just don’t want to let go. There are still too many good things to
do. But many good things to do make too
much of those good things. And anything
good taken too far becomes bad.

We were never designed to be able to cope with too much coming
in.

We have to make a choice — some of those good things have to go. We don’t have the time, energy, inspiration
or any other resource we need to do all the good things we see that could be
done.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

COMPARING one grief with another is not always a great comparison,
but my earliest most resounding grief taught me several things that have proved
invaluable in subsequent griefs.

These learnings include:

1.There is a blessing in being blindsided — we quickly
resolve we cannot do life without God. That’s the most important learning to underpin
the grief response.

2.When there’s nowhere to hide we learn to run to
God, and we should find God is there with
us (yes, we take the Bible at its Word — we believe!) in our horror reality. When we have nowhere else to go we learn — as
we reflect back later on — we’re in the best place ever; the sweet spot of the
will of the Lord, even in the worst of circumstances.

3.We learn that the grief experience is so
horrendously abysmal we never previously credited it as possible. Grief opens our eyes bigtime. Compassion is birthed in us for what others
are enduring, have endured, and will endure.
Mercy of spirit is freed to fly for the fact that life can be so bad.

5.When life has suddenly become nothing we learn
very well what Jesus spoke about when he said we had to lose our lives in order
to save them. This is why grief works out
to be its own compensation. We become
reduced to the only things that can never be taken from us — we are split soul
from spirit so the Spirit can rebuild us from the ground up. A soul vanquished of its vain spirit is then
open to the Spirit — the Holy Spirit. Grief can be a purging of much darkness. Grief can be a refining fire, burning off
ugly bits of our character. And this is
only because we came to the end of ourselves.
A beautiful concept from a healed perspective.

6.A grief borne that didn’t crush us, as we look
back years hence, is the proving ground instilling us with a brimming confidence
to face an unknown and potentially dark future.
Our expectations for life are right-sized. We learn not to expect much at all. And then just about everything is its own
blessing.

7.And all of this is very much underpinned by that
faithfulness of weakness in those early days; moments of surrender when we felt
utterly skittled of sinew and spirit.

These are just some
of the learnings. There would not be enough
libraries in the world to contain all of what God does in and through us
because of our suffering in his name.

Verily, the greatest compensation God gives us in our sheer
reliance on him in our grief is the strength to go on, even in the stark
realness.

I cannot say it any better than this:

Grief teaches the capacity to bear what is real, and to be
bold with reality etched in pain. It’s
God’s compensation for what life has done to
us. Whatever life does to us God can turn
for our good. And such good is not
like-for-like. It’s a superior good.

The very thing that went hard against us proves, through God’s help, to be the very thing that
goes ineradicably for us!

For suffering the screaming pain of grief in loss we’re given
capacities for compassion, mercy, love, resilience, healing, and ultimately, poise
and quietly humble triumph.

Monday, December 28, 2015

That’s the crux of the All Black ‘go for the gap’
culture. It’s built off the Japanese
principle of Kaizen, which is the
total organisational commitment to continuous improvement; a philosophy not so
much constantly dissatisfied as it’s driven to improve out of scientific
curiosity.

Innovation that seeks to reinvent what’s successful — in its
very day of success — is the utilisation of a leader’s core competency; to
constantly reinvent. “The role of the
leader is to know when to reinvent, and how to do it.” (Underlining mine.)

The leader has a role to change things, even when they don’t
appear they need to change. The leader
imagines the need to change is ever present; the fabric of the environment.

Indeed, the leader knows where they need to shift things by
identifying the gap and going for it. Change and adaptation is assumed. And the real skill is knowing what, when to
change, and how to do it.

***

Adapt, while you’re
succeeding. Innovate even when success
is still coming easy. For when success
begins to wane, it’s too late to adapt in keeping the success fluid. Success must be re-established first.

For the All Blacks it’s not enough to just keep
succeeding. It’s better and therefore
appropriate to go for the inevitable gap that shows itself even in success — those
things we ‘got away with’ tonight that we may not get away with tomorrow
morning.

So there’s a reason why it’s harder to stay on top than get
there in the first place. Being on top
breeds either fear or complacency or a warped combination of both. It’s better to continue to embrace change,
going for the gaps that are all too easy to see if we’re intentional, if we’re
truly hopeful of remaining at the top of our game.

So far as personal application is concerned, here it is: we
have a good component of our lives, or something that works in our day. It’s crucial that we know how to replicate
that good thing. And still it’s better
by far to be inspired to improve what is good and make it even better.

The personal
application of ineffaceable truth is this: there
is no standing still in life. There is only forwards or backwards. Refusing to move forward is the complacency
of settling for one fleeting machination of success.

What was successful yesterday, is tedious today, and is
redundant tomorrow. Leadership is not
about yesterday; it’s all about today and tomorrow.

Friday, December 25, 2015

HUMILITY is the hallmark of character that says that the best
leaders — those with character — are never too big to sweep the sheds. That is, to get down and get the fingernails
dirty in the grime of the work at hand.

At the root of the All Black learning culture is the Māori
way of doing things — to never be too big to do the little things, and to do
those little things with a high degree of purpose.

“Humility is deeply ingrained in the Māori and broader
Polynesian culture,” and this is equivalent to Māori mana, which is “great personal prestige and character.”

There is such deep personal respect for the ancestor in Māori
culture. It’s as if each All Black walks
out from the Shed onto the Park to play, to respect the Jersey, to improve
their play, to leave the Jersey in a
better place. And that commitment of
character, bound up in the All Black culture, is not just about on-field success. The All Black is a steward of the massively
steeped history of the All Black tradition.

The commitment of character required of an All Black compels
a questioning culture. No one leader has
all the answers, but the best leaders learn to question in such ways as to
involve those at ground level — to inspire them to help. And this helping is all about cutting away
unhelpful beliefs, but not through instructing, but through guiding. It’s all in how questions are asked that draw
out the deeper wisdom in those involved at the coal face. Those at the coal face have the best
answers. Leaders are best positioned to
ask questions that reveal the answers that are dormant beneath.

So the best leaders don’t have the answers; they ask the best
questions. They drive excellence through
innate curiosity.

And what is most intrinsic about the quality of the All Black
is their personal discipline, the foundation of humility to commends them to
sweep out their shed; to simply clean up after themselves. Their pride is their dignity to do what must
be done. They let no one do what they
alone should do.

For the All Black, their resolve is dug down into the
fissures of their strength; a stoic humility that leaves no stone unturned in
the quest for personal and team excellence.

Legacy is about character that leaves its indelible mark on
those we exist with.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Whenever
we find ourselves on the seas of fury, tossed and thrown around, so ready to
give up, we just have to find a way to keep going.

One
more step... then one more...

With
each step made is strength... found... from nowhere.

That’s
faith.

Faith
is acquired as a necessity, an indispensable journeying companion, for hellish
trips and fearful expeditions.

Courage
is the meal faith dines on immediately before it enters intrepidly on the
journey; a snack partaken of as fear rises up like a beach-breaking wave; a
morsel for calming the nerve enough to keep going in blindness.

Keep
going!

Tough
as this quest is, tough as the present moment seems, and tough as endurance
feels impossible, to keep going is possible.
The options otherwise are untenable.
We daren’t go there! For hell is
an abyss, a very certain spiral into a nether land of purposeless confusion.

But it’s
still impossibly hard.

Faith
says that what seems impossibly hard is possible if we refuse to believe it’s
hopeless. A conviction of, and a
commitment to, resolute cognition. Faith
insists on believing upon the invisible; the barren wasteland makes way for a
vision that is hoped for — that which we insist be seen!

Bring
in hope, as if an abating of the winds, the calming of the swell, the ceasing
of driving rains — at least as our mind’s eye sees for the hope coming.

And it
is tenacity that facilitates the break through, about the time we were, again,
about to give it all up.

Faith
believes in God when there is so much evidence — in our human minds — that God
is a figment. And faith is confidence on
loan in a vacuous hope; it will get us through if we don’t give up.

***

Yes,
so, whenever we find ourselves tossed and thrown on furious seas, so ready to abandon
everything, we just have to find a way to keep going.

To
keep going in the throes of hell is to go the way of hope and faith; the
apparent denial of human reality in belief that God has a different plan.

To
keep going when all seems utterly lost; that’s courage, faith, hope, tenacity,
and a determined resolve that waits on God.

To
keep going is the only way to a certain victory.

Keep
going. A harvest awaits. God is with you. All is not lost as it seems. Pray for serenity in the hopelessness, for
strength from nowhere in weakness, and for poise under the extremities of pressure.

Monday, December 21, 2015

LAST night, like so many nights, is a concept for improvement,
as we look back the following day. Such
is life; a quest for learning and growth. Two concepts we may centre upon in revising
how yesterday either worked or didn’t work are these: professional will and personal
humility:

“Professional Will
looks in the mirror, not the window to apportion responsibility for poor
results, never blaming other people, external factors, or bad luck; Personal Humility looks out of windows,
not the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the company — to other
people and good luck.”

— Jim
Collins, Good to Great

Collins is the leadership guru of
the time. His book charts the things
that leaders of good-to-great organisations did in taking their companies from
expected performance levels to excelling.
And such wisdom just makes sense, doesn’t it? It works.

More or less along the same lines
of having personal success in one’s life, professional will is the courage to
own bad results whilst personal humility showers others in the praise
deserved. These are two essential
attributes in all functionally safe and superior leaders, because, yes, leaders
must first be safe people before they can be superior in their leadership for
the group they lead.

Good Leaders Are Safe People

What makes a good leader safe is
they’re consistently fairer than they
even ought to be; thus they’re inspiring.
They take more responsibility for the failures of their team than is
really fair, but they do so in a dignified way.
They wear the brunt of the failure without being crushed by it. They can be meek in failure without their
self-esteem taking a blow. And they’re
quicker than light speed to reflect credit for achievements onto others, and
not just others they like, and they do this in authentic and believable ways.

Good leaders have professional
will, to bear the brunt of failure and mistakes, whilst also having personal
humility, which resists pride’s opportunity to take the credit when others
deserve the praise. Because they’re
always giving these people are safe
people. They’re reliable and
trustworthy, and, given the dearth of good leadership in our post postmodern
day, are as priceless as they’re also rare.

The good leader is always thinking
of others and, hence, their world expands into a multiplicity of directions; their
ministry is blessed in many secret ways known only to the Lord.

Perhaps this is why many people
like a book like the 2013 book, The Tortoise Usually Wins. Its
author, Dr Brian Harris, commends to the world the industry and care of the
quiet leader whilst the world is all awash, gushing for the leader with guile
and charismata. Little does the church suspect,
that leaders without character don’t last in the secular environment. And from my vantage point the church has been
deceived. There’s little good betting on
a limping horse. Their time catches up
with them. The writing is on the wall
for the leader who prefers to implicate others in the blame whilst fixing
themselves and their favoured ones on the success of others.

The real leader is busy elevating
others at the time of praise, and just as quick to accept the blame when things
don’t go right. Good leaders understand
that it’s the system that needs to be fixed, not the people. Good leaders also understand it’s the people
who radiate the light of inspiring innovation, not the system.

Friday, December 18, 2015

DESPAIR. The time in
your life, in your day, in an instant when you’ve had quite enough. Frustration gives way to pent-up anger, which
gives way to exasperation. You know the
time; you cannot resolve a situation and it sends you into an oblivion of pain,
mental, emotional and spiritual. These sorts of life events appear on a banal
afternoon and disappear by the evening or next morning, or they last on and off
for a season. The point is, despair is felt, it’s never pretty, it resembles
hell in a hand basket, and life is swiftly wished over. And I’m sure just about
every thinking, feeling being has thought and felt it.

So that’s the problem.

What about the solution?

The solution is simple with God, yet not so simple for
us. We overlook the significant and make
important what should never be. We take
time for things that ought not receive our attention, yet we aren’t even aware
of those things that we cost us nothing to save our sorry skin. Our foresight is poor and our hindsight is
useless.

As our moments of despair come, even as they approach
imminently yet from a distance, from within our line of sight, we need
perspective, even as they loom and build.
We must learn to foresee that which intends to crush us. Such skills in the discernment are wisdom as
tools to ward against exasperation.

The opportunity is enhancement; to move beyond temptation to
exasperation.

It’s only the person who is controlled — who is controllable
from outside influences — who can be exasperated. Yet we all fall for such follies of
impetuosity because we fail to expect infuriating circumstances of life that
push us into that territory.

If we expect life will vex us we’ll plan to be gentle with
ourselves in the throes of a second’s insanity. We’ll learn to delay our self-condemnation and
keep the pressured moment simple. Doing
this is about making something inordinately complex astoundingly simple by the efficiency
of inaction. We stop. We brace.
We bear up. And in utter
simplicity for an interminably fractious moment we overcome.

If we’re in the midst of being overwhelmed by exasperated
sorrow beyond our ability to endure, let us stop, and sink, and slow down, and
ponder, and contemplate.

If you’ve had enough, and you’ve been pushed too far, and you’re
ready to give up, don’t doubt God’s ability to restore you, even in a moment.

God changes us through our perspective, which is the power of
the awareness to choose something better against the flow of our tyrannical
mood.

God restores us in the moment of despair by reminding us of
the gentle power in his grace. He empowers us to choose the light.

God gives us grace when we’re in the dark if our hope is
light. But if our hope is dark we’re
already defeated. The power in God’s
grace only works when we add the strength in our weakness to it.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Gratitude cannot coexist with busyness. If we
have too much going on, there’s too much going on to be grateful.

And if there’s too much going on we’re probably
coveting a multitude of things.

And if we’re coveting we’re driven by greed,
envy, lust or fear. Covetousness is a controlling spirit, the evidence of which
we’re being controlled.

Gratitude helps break that chain of control.

And we must contend that life in all its
mystery and power is a life replete with such opportunity to acquire; to take;
to refashion; to manipulate; to reuse, and even to spoil.

Life is a smorgasbord and it feels like we only
have a limited time to dine. And that’s the truth — we do only have so long.
And so we must accept we can’t have everything. We can’t even have most of what
we could have and still have gratitude.

Gratitude is like fertiliser that germinates
the seed of joy lifting it out of the soil into the sunshine where it can grow.

Busyness robs of the opportunity for gratitude.

If we’re to be
found encapsulated in gratitude — found incarcerated in the gratitude trap —
blissfully unable and never wanting to escape — then we will accept that we
must relinquish our grip on that which can be acquired which serves us little
good.

With few
exceptions, busyness is a product of the choices we make that always end in “yes.”
Even our choices to serve people can be pressed too far, like when we cannot
bear not pleasing them.

Busyness that
prevails works against a peaceable gratitude that is ever ours if only we can
kiss goodbye the things that aren’t good for us. There is nothing dressed up as
good thing that is ever worth sacrificing our peaceable gratitude for.

How are we to be ‘trapped’ by gratitude?

The less we have,
the more grateful we are.

This is not against the person materially blessed.
Some people who have much make their way to gratitude by how much they still
give away.

This is not for the person who has paucity. Many
people (but not most) who have little have little because they’re not inspired
or motivated enough to sow back into life with generosity.

The person who
considers things and worry for reputation as poor replacements for life is also
the person who understands that if we’re to be trapped by gratitude we must
give our stuff and our status away. We shouldn’t attempt to keep we should hope
not to retain. What we cannot lost we cannot lose, so there’s no logical fear
for losing.

The product of the
gratitude trap is inner bliss when we surrender what isn’t intended as ours for
what can never any longer not be.

Gratitude happens when vanities and competing
philosophies vanish into the ether in recognition of what God has done in Jesus
Christ. What a lovely place to be retained in.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

THIS is the first
of a long series of articles. It will be
a long series because this term — the gratitude trap — was a gift given; a project
for exploration that shoots beyond the existential constraints of this life,
taking us into the spiritual realm, to the possibilities for joy, those things
steeped in gratitude.

Gratitude seems
such a mystery to those of us at our times of darkness, when we could see no
reason for gratitude, even though we knew we had much to be grateful for.

That made us all
the more furious with ourselves. We judged our hypocrisy. We saw ourselves
lacking what should be owed to God
from us.

So here is the corrective:
the gratitude trap: the right place to be incarcerated.

The gratitude trap.

Imagine
being stuck in a good place.

Ponder a
living a delighted life.

Think how
peace-lit life could be.

The gratitude trap
— everything you want; nothing you don’t need.

Everything we
want, and nothing we don’t need. In other words, total value.

This is the
vision:

To be stuck in
that good place, not being able to survive without gratitude, forced ever into
the farthest reaches of a despicably blessed growth if we stray from it. What
we have here is an aversion therapy for every mental, emotional, and spiritual
ill. This is not to say there is one iota of denial for the state of invisible
illness; but that that very state would compel us, and impel us forward, toward
wellness and whatever that might take. We know it’s gratitude that implicates
joy. So we’re ready to go there, to sacrifice the experiences of loss and grief
in the present, as we press forward into a tomorrow ever coming. That day of
joy, it comes, and it comes closer by the day and hour. In the meantime, we
practice gratitude, and we’re daily indelibly won to what we now cannot live
without. If we get frustrated, it’s for the right reasons; the right purpose is
in mind. Some may say we’ve changed, and that they’re not sure for the better.
But we know that we must fight to feel grateful. We must hold the faith.

Finally, we’re
caught between a place where we can no longer live and the promised land. That
promised land is now within arm’s reach.

Notice that the
acronym is W.A.R.

Within Arm’s Reach
(W.A.R.) is so close yet so far. We have embarked on a journey that we can no
sooner turn back on. We’re in a war, and it’s only with ourselves. And, where
we do not give up, we will end up there, the prison of our joy; in a gaol of
glory.

So let the
festivities of the struggle commence!

We make this commitment,
in gratitude or not: to be grateful, and for gratitude to trap us there where
we cannot any longer escape.

***

The journey to the
acquisition of gratitude is a war, and each battle is fought and won in the
fields of selfishness.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

ONE thing a major
life grief teaches us is grief cannot kill us. Indeed, just as it is that the Lord tells “the satan” (ha-satan) “you
must not lay a hand on [Job] himself,” Satan has no dominion over us that we
would not otherwise give him. Grief cannot finish us. Only our wretched
despair, in a moment of overwhelming sheer panic, can do that. And it’s always
our prayer that life will be preserved; there is always an ‘afterward’ in store
after every recovered-from grief.

There are so very
many varied forms of grief, from losses that shatter the way life was, to
change that occurs beyond the realm of our will, to the frustration of a
cherished dream that cannot now ever be.

But there’s one
thing grief is intended to teach us, and that is to grieve our losses well in the first place.

A grief done once
is a grief done well. Just as the opposite is true.

Experience the Pain Once – Be Healed of the Pain Well

We
shrink in the pain of our grief and we cannot stand to endure it. We shrink, we
shriek, we shirk the work. But experiencing the brutality of the pain once — even
if that ‘once’ is over days, weeks or months — then we have submitted to our
pain for our healing’s sake. We’ve submitted to our pain in faith that God will
help. We’ve surrendered to God, in the experience of fact. We’ve learned what
to do with pain; to submit to it in the Presence of a helping and healing God.
And a season of bearing will teach us we can
do this! Such a season teaches us there’s confidence gained in enduring,
which is a looking back over what we were able to stand.

“Well
done, good and faithful servant,” we may well hear. And it’s appropriate we do.

We
needn’t go there needlessly or without intention. The intention is to meet the
pain right where it faces us. The intention is to go into the truth of our
reality — to face it as, not a perfect person, but as a fallible yet redeemed man or woman of God.

The
thesis is simple: experience the pain, for real, once, and be healed of the
pain well.

But,
wait, there’s more. There’s more to this; a whole lot more:

Experience
this pain once, and be
healed of this pain well.

Experience
this pain once; experience healing well.

This pain I refer to is
the generic pain of grief — of loss that has no silver lining. To a vast
degree this is a confounding and perplexing pain. But what God is teaching us
in facing this pain is a very important lesson; he is showing us how future pain can and will be dealt with.
We’re learning vital life skills. We’re learning to manage our emotions in the
crucible of an oft-pain-filled life.

Experience the Pain Well – Be Healed of the Pain At Once

How do we experience the pain well. Well, we
shirk none of it. The pain is destined to consume us, so why do we protect
ourselves in denial, anger and bargaining? We do that because it seems the easy
way out. But there is no easy way out of this.

What seems easy initially proves to be a fat
waste of time. A grief we refused to ‘do’ just comes back at us, perhaps with interest,
in five years’ time.

But if we enter the pain that is real to our
reality, we honour God. God esteems us when we are true enough to life, because
of our circumstantial humility, to honour our reality. It’s all we can do to
obey him. It’s all we need to do. It’s all he expects of us. And we’re blessed
because we obeyed. Because we take to the task of our truth, God makes the task
doable.

When we meet the experience of our pain well,
we’re well on the way to being healed of our pain once-and-for-all.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

“It’s the love of
God that makes it safe to come out [of your shadow].”

— Pete Scazzero

TRANSPARENCY is an
important concept in the Kingdom, for without transparency we don’t have trust,
and if there’s no trust there’s no relationship, and if there’s no relationship
there’s no community, and nothing can be changed for the Kingdom of God without
community. So, if we’re to be ‘community’ we must first have established
transparency within ourselves, that is also ‘projected’ out into our world, in
order to build trust and relationship.

When I establish
transparency within myself I begin to see where the problems in the world lie —
they’re in me. It does me no good whatsoever to think the problems in the world
lie in the patch of the world — I can nothing about the world. But I can fix me, through God’s grace and power, when
I call him into my life through my vertical (looking upward) relationship with
him, to the exclusion of all
distractions — like other people and their impact on me.

Facing my shadow
and being honest is my acceptance of God’s eternal invitation, so I can be
better for me, for others, and for God.

Going Vertical to God
and Inward Into My Shadow

In my shadow
I think I’m strong,

It’s in my shadow
that I won’t last long.

In my
shadow I battle and contend,

It’s in my shadow
I should try not to defend.

In my
shadow I deserve respect!

It’s in my shadow my
pride needs to be checked.

It’s in my
shadow my standards are high,

But it’s only the
Lord I’ll find in the sky!

In my
shadow I get tense,

It’s in my shadow
I’m reminded I need no defence.

In my
shadow I hate delay,

It’s in my shadow
I ought to be still today.

In my
shadow I’m afraid to lose,

It’s in my shadow
I need fear defused.

In my
shadow I want my way,

It’s in my shadow
I should not want to stay.

In my
shadow it’s always their fault,

It’s in my shadow
I need to refrain from assault.

In my
shadow I find I stray,

It’s in my shadow
I need to pray.

In my shadow
I’m found weak,

It’s in my shadow
I need to seek…

In my shadow…
Christ shows me my need of him.

***

Going well
vertical with God gives us confidence and humility in going horizontal with
others. Faith is simple: face God, face your shadow, and only then face others.

Facing your shadow
and casting it for the Kingdom is converting sin into God’s light for his glory
through humility.

God
loves the sinner inside you. Your job is to love the sinner inside you. Accept
yourself and life is made 99% easier. Accept yourself and then guilt is not the
motive for growth. Accept yourself and healing is possible.